Liked my trials with it enough to spring for a $20/annum commercial subscription, instead of freeloading, but they don't want my money. The old freeloader terms were that your stuff was public, not private, and although you retained full rights to original/source files, other Aviary users had derivative rights, i.e., to make art derived from others' original/source files (that in turn become new derived original/source files. But now they're not taking money, and art can be private, public, unaccessible, whitelisted, commercially licensed, various Creative Commons Licenses, basically however a user wants to lock up or open their stuff. Pretty cool. I really wanted to give them my money, however - I'll spook out a modest endowment.

Stuff happens on their internal cloud and is redundantly backed up on Amazon S3 - Nice. DVD backups coming. Currently, rasters and vector-metafile download/export to user local disk as flattened usual raster formats and EPS and SVG.

Between the various editors you can do a lot of neat stuff. Haven't played with it enough, but what little indicates a lot of promise, looking like editor-to-editor workarounds could accomplish any standalone editor deficiencies, but as it is they've got pretty much all the core illustrator's tools and operations ( except for charts/graphs garbage, etc ). No explicit booleans as of yet, but that's not a showstopper. Other than that, damned spanky.

I'm going to use it for some pretty simple illustration stuff for a clothing line, whitelist the view permissions, non-editable permissions, so that makes it pretty nice using Aviary bandwidth, having them backed up securely, offload the managing hassles, etc, etc. Sweet. Still gonna spook out a donation/endowment/whatever to these guys, though, as this is really great what they're doing, and the stuff works good.

Yeah, I know, but these days I don't library any source stuff, just flattened stuff for legal reasons and a few things for posterity. Anything else is a PITA.

Quote:

As of today, we have decided to make using Aviary's suite of editing tools FREE for everyone.

At Aviary, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to powerful creation tools. We therefore chose our company mission to be We make creation accessible to everyone. Our powerful set of tools helps fulfill this mission by enabling small businesses, students, artists & creators across different genres.

As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone.

We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone - not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don't limit individuals in any way. We are excited at the opportunity to stay true to our mission. Not many companies are so fortunate.

What does that mean exactly? Now everyone can:# Save private files on Aviary.# Add your own automatic watermark or go watermark-free.# Access all tutorials.

Existing subscribers who signed up in the last 30 days can request refunds. For all other past Blue plan members, we will cancel all future recurring payments directly. You will remain on indefinitely as our legacy Blue Supporters (recognized by the blue badges wherever they appear on Aviary's site) and you will continue to gain first access to all alpha products we release (rumor has it that a new one is floating around). And of course, we can't thank you enough for supporting Aviary's growth and development. That means the world to us.

Thanks for your continued support and we looking forward to seeing what you create.

Xplain's use of MacNews, AppleCentral and AppleExpo are not affiliated with Apple, Inc. MacTech is a registered trademark of Xplain Corporation. AppleCentral, MacNews, Xplain, "The journal of Apple technology", Apple Expo, Explain It, MacDev, MacDev-1, THINK Reference, NetProfessional, MacTech Central, MacTech Domains, MacForge, and the MacTutorMan are trademarks or service marks of Xplain Corp. Sprocket is a registered trademark of eSprocket Corp. Other trademarks and copyrights appearing in this printing or software remain the property of their respective holders.

All contents are Copyright 1984-2010 by Xplain Corporation. All rights reserved. Theme designed by Icreon.